Thereat I was hurried, by the “blue” that was responsible for my transfer, and an understrapper with the keys, by way of a gloomy course--up and down--through doorways clinched with monstrous bolts--under vaulted stone roofs where spiders, blinded by the lamp glare, shrank back into crevices, and where all the mildew of desolation sprouted in a poisonous fungus--along passages deeply quarried, it seemed, into the very foundations of despair; and at last they stopped, thrust me forward, and a door clapped to behind me with a slam of thunder. I stood a moment where I was and caught at my bewildered faculties. It took me, indeed, but a moment to possess myself of them. In those days one had acquired a habit of wearing one’s wits unsheathed in one’s belt. Then I fell to admiring the quite unwonted brilliancy of the illumination that pervaded the cell. It was a particularly small chamber--perhaps ten feet by eight or so--and consequently the single lighted candle, held in a cleft stick the butt of which was thrust into a chink in the stones, irradiated it to its uttermost corner. The furniture was artless in its simplicity--a tub, a broken pitcher of water, and two heaps of foul straw. But so abominable a stench filled the place that no doubt there was room for little else. Now, from one of the straw beds, the figure of a man--my sole comrade to be, it would appear--rose up as I stirred, and stood with its back and the palms of its hands pressed against the wall. Remaining thus motionless, the shadows blue in its gaunt cheeks, and little husks of wheat caught in its dusty hair, it fixed me with eyes like staring pebbles. “_Défense d’entrer!_” it snapped out suddenly, and shut its mouth like a gin. “Oh, monsieur!” said I, “no going out, rather, for the mouse in the trap.” He lifted one of his arms at right angles to his body, and let it drop again to his side. “Behold!” he cried, “the peril! Hadst thou been closer thy head had fallen!” “But thine,” said I. “Hast thou not already lost it?” “Oh, early in the struggle, monsieur! Oh, very early! And then my soul passed into the inanimate instrument of death and made it animate.” “What! thou art the guillotine itself?” “Look at me, then! Is it not obvious that I am that infernal engine, nor less that I am informed with the _ego_ that once was my victim and is now my familiar--being myself, in effect?” “_Pardieu!_ this is worse than the game of ‘Proverbs.’ It rests with thy _ego_, then, to put a period to this orgy of blood.” He gave forth a loud wailing cry. “I am a demon, prejudged and predestined, and the saint of the Place du Trône is possessed with me.” “A saint, possessed!” He wrung his hands insanely.